It is common today for employees to record time during which they have worked for a business or organization in a time card (also called time sheet), which is used to compute and pay salaries. A time card prepared on paper or in spreadsheet software typically has columns for days of the week (M, Tu, W, Th, F, Sa, Su), and rows in which the user can manually enter hours of each day that were spent in work, with one row for each job. Software, such as QuickBooks® available from Intuit Inc. can be used to assist an employee in tracking time spent in working, e.g. via a screen to enter time spent on a single activity, by use of a stop watch (or timer) therein. Such a stop watch can be operated on a screen displayed on a personal computer (PC) in the normal manner, using a “start” button, a “stop” button, and a “pause” button.
US Publication 2010/0324964 is incorporated by reference herein as background. US Publication 2010/0324964 describes an automatic work monitoring system that may be implemented in an instant messaging application so that employee hours can automatically be tracked and associated with projects. The work monitoring system of US Publication 2010/0324964 can determine that an activity is associated with a project based on context of the activity and an employee's work profile. This work monitoring system can determine the amount of time spent on the activity and record the amount of time in a daily work record, which may be used for payroll, billing, etc. The work monitoring system can also update the employee's presence information to indicate that the employee is working on the project, to update the employee's instant messaging contacts about the employees work activity.
US Publication 2003/0204367 is incorporated by reference herein as background. US Publication 2003/0204367 describes automatically tracking time spent by end users in different applications on the end users' computers while performing tasks. The time keeping application is integrated with at least some of the applications on the end user computers. This integration allows the time keeping application to detect and track events, such as the opening and closing of files that signify a change in the task being performed by the end users, by receiving messages directly from the other applications being used by the end user. Reports of timekeepers' activities may be used to generate invoices, which may be generated by the time keeping application itself or which may be used as an input into an accounting application that generates invoices.
A drawback in methods of the type described by US Publication 2003/0204367 and US Publication 2010/0324964 is that an employee's time appears to be recorded indiscriminately. More specifically, in both US Publication 2003/0204367 and US Publication 2010/0324964 it appears that recording of time occurs without user input, e.g. as to whether a specific activity the user is performing is work or personal. So, prior art can benefit by an improvement made by the current inventor, as follows.